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HP Leaps Ahead With Fast Dedupe for Backup Workloads

The StoreOnce backup appliance aims to provide a one-stop shop for all your data deduplication needs -- wherever the data resides in the system.

Hewlett-Packard made a significant leap ahead in the storage systems market Nov. 29 when it launched a fast-processing, enterprise-scale, disk-based backup system with an advanced data deduplication feature.

HP, which calls the new dedupe scheme "Deduplication 2.0," claims that its B6200 StoreOnce Backup System can process and restore data at the breakneck speed of 28TB per hour, which the company contends is at least three times the rate of competing systems that it chose not to name.

In HP's mind, Deduplication 2.0 is a unified process designed to break down silos of data caused by the use of multiple products and platforms, Sean Kinney, director of product marketing for HP Storage, told eWEEK.

Further reading

"The [conventional] storage world is mostly about point products to solve point problems within the customer's environment," Kinney said. "In the deduplication 2.0 world, it should be about one common deduplication algorithm across the enterprise, really for deployment independence."

Thus, StoreOnce aims to provide a one-stop shop for all your data deduplication needs-wherever the data resides in the system, Kinney said. The efficiencies are found in simpler operation, fewer specialists required to do the job and centralized control.

The B6200 can scale to a massive 768TB (512TB usable) of raw capacity, Kinney said. There is a lot of overhead required for RAID-based systems in order to handle all that processing. Users can start out with as little as 48TB, then add capacity as needed, because it's all modular.

StoreOnce also features an automated restart that provides failover between nodes; this automatically restarts failed backup jobs using other disks, Kinney said. To further its high availability, HP supports replication from 384 devices in a fan-in configuration. To lessen costs, HP bundles source licenses for replication with remote devices.

Adaptive Micro-Chunking

Finally, the B6200 has something called "adaptive micro-chunking." HP has chosen a variable 4KB chunk size for its data blocks that uses a sliding windows-type algorithm that adjusts for the type of data format being deduplicated. This can result in deduplication performance as high as 35-to-1, Kinney said.

Kinney said the StoreOnce Backup System starts at $250,000 for a 48TB deployment. The system is available now.